Memory Press

Hillary James

Description

Rose Pinner Knight, abruptly widowed and homeless, is in a quandary. Should she return to New York City in spite of the fact that she is no longer able to return to her job as an antiquarian book seller's assistant, or remain in Britain and try to start a small business? She has an idea but will it work?She finds a job as a last resort in the London household of a now elderly but once famous chef, severely afflicted with arthritis. The chef's gardener, a bitter ex-soldier, comes and goes as he pleases as he has been given keys to the house. The woman's relatives, also with keys, come to pursue their own agenda but are outmanoeuvred into hiring Rose on a month's probation.Can Rose engage her employer's interest in recalling and recording her past? What can she do to help the truanting child in the wood? How can she avoid the caustic tongue of the gardener? She finds herself in a bleak place without friends or help but allows herself to reach out to those around her. This may be a waste of effort of course.

Sujets

• Historical fiction

Informations

• Publié par: Troubador Publishing Ltd
• Date de parution: 11 janvier 2021
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781800467415
• Langue: English

Extrait

Copyright © 2020 Hillary James

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in any form or by any means, with the prior permission in writing of the publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside those terms should be sent to the publishers.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

Matador®
9 Priory Business Park,
Wistow Road, Kibworth Beauchamp,
Leicestershire. LE8 0RX
Tel: [phone]
Email: [e-mail]
Web: www.troubador.co.uk/matador
Twitter: @matadorbooks

ISBN 9781800467415

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Matador® is an imprint of Troubador Publishing Ltd
Contents
Chapter 01
Chapter 02
Chapter 03
Chapter 04
Chapter 05
Chapter 06
Chapter 07
Chapter 08
Chapter 09
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 01
London, August 1955
“My niece said you were a widow, dear. Is that right? You seem very young to me but then I’m approaching eighty they tell me. I suppose they are right. Was it the war or one of those conflicts in the colonies? Aden maybe or some other outpost of empire eager for self- rule? There are rather a lot of them, I fear.” The diminutive old lady sat in a wing-backed armchair so capacious that her feet did not reach the floor.
Rose shook her head. “No, no. He had a heart attack. I thought he was better. He hadn’t been eating, you see, and when he said he fancied sprats, I felt sure he was getting better so I went out to find them. I hate them myself.”
She grimaced as she thought of the first time she had ever eaten the little silver fish. It had been in Exeter in the flat Simon had been sharing with the cleric, Stephen – her first night in Exeter when the sprats had been presented as a treat and she had managed to pull the hideous little fried creatures through her teeth in the prescribed manner. She could have gagged at the memory of it but pursed her lips instead and tried to smile. It would not do to offend her interviewer since this was really her last hope of employment.
Surely the old woman’s opinion mattered even though the niece, Mrs McNulty, was obviously in charge. Rose could hear the niece bustling about somewhere beneath the room in which she sat, a sitting room furnished with a large three piece suite, upholstered in a nubby green fabric which reminded her of dried peas. There was also a sideboard and next to it a curio cabinet.
After a little silence, Rose realized that a fuller answer to her interviewer’s question was expected of her. “We had a flat here in Leytonstone on The High Street where there’s a fish market as I’m sure you know so I thought it would be all right to leave him alone for a few minutes while I fetched the fish. I knew the flat would stink for days after I cooked them, the fish I mean, but I would have done anything, anything at all to get him to eat something.”
The old lady nodded. “Of course. I quite understand. And when you got back . . . .?”
“When I got back, he was dead. He was gone. He lay there but he was gone. There was no breath. His eyes were open but . . . .” She tried staring at the elaborate Victorian ceiling but no amount of effort stemmed the tears. She had promised herself that she would maintain her composure whatever it cost her in effort but it was not a promise she could keep. She struggled to cry silently but soon enough she was sobbing noisily. She fumbled in her handbag for a tissue and tried to stem the flood by pressing the crumpled paper to her eyes. She heard the old woman banging on the floor with her cane and then ordering a pot of tea.
Rose tried to calm herself by digging the fingernails of one hand into the palm of the other. “I am very sorry,” she stuttered.
“I quite understand. You take your time. I shouldn’t have asked. I didn’t realize your loss was quite so recent. My nieces are always saying I have no tact but then they are always telling me so many things that I tend not to pay too much attention. Let’s talk of something else.” The other woman, a tiny person of five feet and maybe half an inch pulled herself up in the wing-backed armchair and leaned forward. “Now, you don’t sound like an Englishwoman. Why don’t you tell me where you come from? I’m from the West Indies, from Jamaica. Did my nieces tell you that? I came here as a child of eight to join my father’s household and I’ve never gone back.”
“I wouldn’t have guessed that,” Rose said, blowing her nose and patting her face with the soggy tissue. “You don’t have an accent any more though I know I do. I’m an American, a New Yorker. I came here in 1953 to visit Simon in Exeter and we got engaged. Then I went home and came back again in January this year and we got married in a registry office. We came to London in July when the term finished so he could do some research on Roman London but he got ill almost immediately. The doctors said he wouldn’t have had a heart attack in his twenties if he hadn’t had a damaged heart from rheumatic fever as a child. It was bad luck.” Rose hiccupped and stared firmly again at the ceiling, which was stained yellow by old cigarette smoke and countless coal fires, she guessed. “We had only been married seven months.”
“But you are entitled to work here by virtue of your marriage, aren’t you?”
Rose nodded. She had been told Clare Hart, Miss Clare Hart, required a carer, a full-time carer but the elderly lady sitting opposite her seemed of sound mind, of very sound mind in fact so perhaps her frailties were physical. She seemed able to hear and see well enough though so she might have lost the use of her legs, Rose conjectured.
She thought about how to answer the woman’s question. “I had a lovely job in New York City as assistant to an antiquarian book expert but he died and his younger brother, who inherited the business, made it clear that my services were no longer required,” she explained. “My employer left me a bequest, enough money to marry and set up home with Simon in Exeter so that’s what we did. Then we came up to London for the summer break as I told you. He’s a lecturer at the uni in Exeter. Simon was . . . was.” She looked away towards the bow-fronted window and the busy street hazily visible through net curtains beyond it.
“You could go back to The States now though, couldn’t you, my dear?” Miss Hart laced her fingers together and cocked her head at an enquiring angle and Rose thought of a bird, a long-necked baby swan perhaps watching by the side of a pond.
She shook her head and shuddered. “I couldn’t. I couldn’t leave him here in the . . . . I couldn’t leave him here. Besides I want to start a business, helping people like yourself to compile a record of some kind, a book, an album, a recording of memories, recollections of the past. I plan to call such a record ‘a memory press.’
Miss Hart uttered a bark of laughter. “I see. I am to be an experiment, a trial run so to speak, a bit like a monkey in a cage.”
“You make it sound like an imposition. That’s not at all what I mean, Miss Hart. We would only do as much or as little as you wanted. If you found the experience unpleasant, we would stop immediately. It’s meant to be interesting and pleasurable for you.”
“Have you explained this to my nieces? They don’t really approve of pleasure.”
Rose caught the irony in the other woman’s voice and frowned. “Do you mean that you think they would object for some reason?”
“They are very literal minded, my nieces. If I were you, I wouldn’t mention your scheme to them. Concentrate on your house-keeping and cookery skills when they ask you questions. I’m intrigued. Spending your days sitting in a chair is extremely tedious. I can’t walk about much . . . can’t do stairs. Confined to this floor really. Fortunately the bathroom is on this floor and I sleep next door but I’m stuck mostly like an old turtle on its back. I could do with a little experimenting but they don’t need to hear about it. My nieces will over-rule me and hire some retired nursing sister who will know what’s good for me and it won’t be what I want. Tell them you make a fine custard. Eggs are off the rations, aren’t they?”
There was the sound of heavy footfalls on the stairs and the middle-aged woman who had ushered Rose in appeared with a cup of tea in her hand. She was a large woman and had clearly found the stairs an effort. She hauled air into her lungs and put the tea down firmly next to her elderly aunt. “She’ll have to have hers downstairs.” She gestured at Rose. “The next one’s here and she’s waiting. You’ve been a long time with this one.” Her disapproval was evident.
“I would like Mrs Knight to wait, Barbara. She can wait downstairs as you suggest.”
The niece was imposing. She stood over her little aunt in a way Rose thought rather intimidating but Miss Hart did not display signs of discomfort. “I will see this other person now as you suggest but then you and your sister and I will have a few words on the subject before any decisi